Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

Oppenheimer told Pash that the agent who tempted his colleagues had been careful to present his proposal not as espionage but as a facilitation of existing US policy — an allusion, probably, to Lend-Lease:

But it was not presented in that method. It is a method of carrying out a policy which was more or less a policy of the Government. The form in which it came was that couldn't an interview be arranged with this man Eltenton who had very good contact with a man from the Embassy attached to the consulate who is a very reliable guy and who had a lot of experience in microfilm or whatever.

Here were the usual mechanisms of Soviet espionage, paralleling those that Elizabeth Bentley and Harry Gold made notorious in later public testimony: a man from the embassy, a non-Soviet cut-out, an appeal to guilt and rationalization, microfilm. (Igor Gouzenko notes independently the “varied approaches made on Soviet instruction when atomic bomb information was demanded. Astonishingly enough it was shown there that when it comes to something really big, the money appeal isn't used. The appeal to ‘higher feelings’ such as the ‘good of the world’ proved most effective for Soviet Intelligence.”)

After the war, Oppenheimer would claim that the story he told Pash, except for the name Eltenton, was “wholly false.” His revised 1954 version of what happened at Berkeley disconnected him from “microfilm,” from the Soviet consulate and from the wider knowledge of espionage approaches that he described to Boris Pash in 1943:

One day… in the winter of 1942-43, Haakon Chevalier came to our home. It was, I believe, for dinner, but possibly for a drink. When I went out into the pantry, Chevalier followed me or came with me to help me. He said, “I saw George Eltenton recently.” Maybe he asked me if I remembered him. That Eltenton had told him that he had a method, he had means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists. He didn't describe the means. I thought I said “But that is treason,” but I am not sure. I said anyway something. “This is a terrible thing to do.” Chevalier said or expressed complete agreement. That was the end of it. It was a very brief conversation.

But the FBI interviewed Eltenton in 1946, and Eltenton confirmed a story closer to the original version that Oppenheimer had told Pash:

[Eltenton] admitted being approached by [Soviet military attache] Peter Ivanov for the purpose of obtaining information as to what was going on “up on the hill [i.e., at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory].” Eltenton admitted approaching Haakon Chevalier, who he knew was friendly with J. Robert Oppenheimer and requested Chevalier to approach Oppenheimer concerning the project. He advised that Chevalier agreed to the approach and then subsequendy advised that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining the information.

FBI agents interviewed Chevalier the same day in June 1946 that they questioned Eltenton. Chevalier offered a version of events different from Eltenton's and identical to Oppenheimer's exculpatory 1954 version. Op- penheimer gave Chevalier's version for the first time to the FBI in September 1946; between June and September the two friends had met and had opportunity to concert their stories.

Eltenton may even have maneuvered to approach Oppenheimer directly before Chevalier came to call. So at least an investigator suspected, and seems to have had surveillance to corroborate:

Q. Had you met Eltenton on many other occasions?

A. Oh, yes…

Q. Where?

A. I don't remember.

Q. A social occasion?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you recall any of them?

A. No.

Q. Do you recall who introduced you to him?

A. No.

Q. Did Eltenton come to your house on any other occasion?

A. I am quite sure not.

Q. Did he come to your house in 1942 on one occasion to discuss certain awards which the Soviet Government was going to make to certain scientists? A. If so, it is news to me. I assume you know that this is true, but I certainly have no recollection of it…

Q. Let me see if I can refresh your recollection, Doctor. Do you recall him coming to your house to discuss awards to be made to certain scientists by the Soviet Government and you suggesting the names of Bush, Morgan, and perhaps one of the Comptons? A. There is nothing unreasonable in the suggestions.

Lavrenti Beria evidently put uncommon faith in the persuasive power of awards.

* * *

Igor Gouzenko was posted to Canada from the USSR in June 1943- Officially he would be a civilian employee of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa; in fact he was a cipher clerk on the staff of the military attache, Colonel Nicolai Za-botin, the head of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in Ottawa (his organization called the NKVD “the Neighbor”). Zabotin — “tall, handsome, personable,” writes Gouzenko, someone whose “magnetic personality attracted contacts” — organized a phalanx of Canadian agents among politicians, bureaucrats and scientists working on explosives, electronics and atomic energy.

Israel Halperin, a mathematician who was Canadian-born of Russian parents, was attached to the Canadian Directorate of Artillery and reported to the GRU on weapons and explosives under the code name “Bacon.” He carried Kristel Heineman's Cambridge address and Klaus Fuchs's British address in his address book and had supplied Fuchs with science journals when Fuchs had been interned in Canada in 1940.

Edward Wilfred Mazerall, a Canadian electrical engineer, worked on radar. “I did not like the idea of supplying information,” he testified. Echoing Oppenheimer, he noted: “It was not put to me so much that I was supplying information to the Soviet Government, either. It was more that as scientists we were pooling information, and I actually asked if we could hope to find this reciprocal.”

There were dozens of such conspirators tunneled into the Canadian political and defense establishment whose information Gouzenko coded for forwarding to Moscow, including a Russian-born member of the Canadian Parliament, Fred Rose; Elizabeth Bentley had serviced Rose's correspondence with Jacob Golos in New York a few years earlier through a mail drop. The most significant two among the twenty Canadian agents later identified were the physicists Alan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo.

Nunn May, whom his friends described as “a charming, shy little man with a dry sense of humor” who wore old-fashioned glasses with round lenses, was another Cambridge product, a 1933 graduate who had been recruited by Donald Maclean. He had been a reader in physics at London University in May 1942 when he was asked to join the British atomic-energy program, which was code-named Tube Alloys Research. He had come to Canada from England in January 1943 as a member of a research team headed by John Cockcroft, a senior Cambridge physicist who would win a 1951 Nobel Prize. Joining an existing organization in Montreal, Cockcroft's team carried out research adjunct to the atomic-bomb development work going on in the United States; the Canadians were building a large heavy-water-moderated natural-uranium reactor at Chalk River, three hours north of Ottawa. “Before coming to Canada,” a postwar Canadian investigation revealed, “[Nunn May] was an ardent but secret Communist and already known to the authorities at Moscow.” Nunn May communicated with Zabotin under the cover name “Alek.” He perceived his espionage idealistically, a la russe. “The whole affair was extremely painful to me,” he would confess, “and I only embarked on it because I felt this was a contribution I could make to the safety of mankind. I certainly did not do it for gain.” He was a member of two committees in Montreal which gave him access to secret reports.

In January 1944, Nunn May visited the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, the center of US nuclear-reactor research. He met General Groves, who had authorized his visit. He returned in April. At that time, Groves reported after the war, “he worked on a minor experiment at the Argonne Laboratory, where the original